On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney • Hacker News Board

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#881

Post by cwkoss » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 5:24 PM UTC

johnnyanmac wrote: post #876

tekknik wrote: post #863

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A magnitude of difference, yes. Even a printing press will be limited by natural resources, which require humans to procure. A computer server can do a lot more with a lot less. And is much easier to scale than a printing press. AI runs on some of the most power hungry and expensive silicon on the planet. Comparing a GPU cluster and a printing press then staring the GPU cluster not limited by natural resources is j…

>Comparing a GPU cluster and a printing press then staring the GPU cluster not limited by natural resources is just silly. Where does the materials come from to make the processors? Probably mined from 3rd world country slaves (in the literal "owning people" sense). But still, these servers already exist and scale up way more than a tree. >well. I could see a picture and then ask AI whose style it is. Then I could go…

> Probably mined from 3rd world country slaves (in the literal "owning people" sense).

Why do you think the device you're using to make this comment is better than a GPU?

Was your comment written by some new flamebait AI? You say so many arguments that fall apart under the slightest examination

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#882

Post by mlyle » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 5:26 PM UTC

bluefirebrand wrote: post #852

mlyle wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't know what percentage is independent inspiration for a person using the AI to create art. Once upon a time it was a contentious idea that humans had significant authorship in photographs, which merely mechanically captured the world. What % is the camera's independent inspiration? Here, we have humans guiding what's often a quite involved process of synthesis of past human (and machine) creation.

> We don't know what percentage is independent inspiration for a person using the AI to create art The person using the AI doesn't matter in the equation. They aren't an artist, they're a monkey with a typewriter. We're talking about the AI here, because it can generate the same images no matter which monkey with a typewriter is typing the prompts.

> The person using the AI doesn't matter in the equation. They aren't an artist, they're a monkey with a typewriter.

That's an opinion.

Does your opinion hold in all circumstances? If I spend 20 hours with an AI, iterating prompts, erasing portions of output and asking it to repaint and blend, and combining scenes-- did I do anything creative?

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#883

Post by rideontime » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 5:28 PM UTC

twism wrote: post #693

rideontime wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much in the same way I've "given" my wallet to a thief by leaving it my unlocked car.

how is posting something in public space analogous to leaving an item in an unlocked car where either you either did not mean to leave it there and/or leave the car unlocked?

When did I say I did so unintentionally?

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#884

Post by notfed » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 5:28 PM UTC

edent wrote: post #619

nojvek wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People and them are quite varied though. One one hand I want better AI that can generate whatever image that comes to my mind. On the other hand I don’t want it to blatantly copy someone else’s style that they spent years making. US is pretty fucked since it has very little safety net compared to other modern countries if AI really started replacing humans. This is people’s livelihoods we are talking about. Will AI c…

> People and them are quite varied though. So ask permission. Do you want to have our model ingest your work? Y/N

The problem is this doesn't scale.

How do you ask permission? ? How do you know the original author of the image is the one posting this?

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#885

Post by rideontime » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 5:29 PM UTC

Minor49er wrote: post #727

rideontime wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me be clear: it is the knowledge that an image was created with midjourney that repulses me, not the visual appeal of the image itself.

That is unfortunate

It is also not an uncommon opinion, which you should keep in mind if you intend to use AI-generated imagery in your products.

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#886

Post by cwkoss » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 5:34 PM UTC

sandworm101 wrote: post #379

soulofmischief wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I bought the books used for 25 cents at a local booksale, and the authors did not benefit from my secondary market transaction.

>> the authors did not benefit from my secondary market transaction. But they did. The presence of a secondary market for used books increased the value of some new books. People buy them knowing that they might one day recoup some costs by selling them. Would people pay more, or less, for a new car if they were told they could never sell or trade it away as a used car?

Lol, did an AI write this? Literally no one buys books because they might one day recoup a fraction of the sticker price on the secondary market.

Baffling

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#887

Post by romwell » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 5:35 PM UTC

jeremyjh wrote: post #21

rimeice wrote: post #5

The sooner anyone making profit from models trained on creators proprietary content start paying for the content they’re using the better for creators, society and even the AI companies. It’s pretty tiring hearing people argue about whether copyright law applies to AI companies or not. It applies. Just get on and sort out a proper licensing model.

It applies - but how it applies is simply not settled. Clearly, there is no statistical model that can launder IP. If someone uses Midjourney to produce someone else's IP, that user (not Midjourney) would be in violation of copyright if they use it in a way that does not conform to the license, such as by creating their own website of cat and girl comics and running Adsense on it. However, if other artists are inspir…

>Clearly, there is no statistical model that can launder IP.

Of course. The model isn't making a decision as to what may be used as training data. The humans training it do.

>If someone uses Midjourney to produce someone else's IP, that user (not Midjourney) would be in violation of copyright

That's like saying that if a user unpacks the dune _full_movie.zip I'm sharing online, it's them who have produced the copyrighted work. And me, the human who put the movie Dune into that zip file, is doing no wrong. Clearly, there is no compression algorithm that can launder IP, right?

>However, if other artists are inspired by this style of comic, and it influences their work - that is simply fair use

The AI isn't inspired by anything. It's not a sentient being, it's not making decisions, and its behavior isn't regulated by laws because it does not have a behavior of its own. Humans decide what goes into an AI model, and what goes out. And humans who train AI models on art don't get "inspired". They transform it into a derivative work — the AI model.

One that has been shown to be awfully close to dune_full_movie.zip if you use the right unpacking tools. But even that isn't necessary. Using work of others in your own work without permission and credit usually goes by less inspiring words: plagiarism, theft, ripping off.

Regardless of whether you reproduce the work 1:1, and whether you can be punished by law for it.

>tool like Midjourney - that is inspired by the art but doesn't reproduce it

Never in the history of humanity has the word inspired meant something that a tool can do. If it's "inspired" (which is something only sentient beings can do), then we should be crying out about human right abuses the way the AI models are trained and treated.

If it's just a tool, it's not "inspired".

You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either pay your computer minimum wage for working for you, or stop saying that it can get "inspired" by art (whether it's training an AI model or creating a zip file).

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#888

Post by romwell » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 5:37 PM UTC

lokjhfvvv wrote: post #842

romwell wrote: post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Seems lazy to differentiate between types of intelligence without providing any substance as to why you believe one type is more worthy of learning than another and criticizing others for the same laziness Seems lazy to call a genAI model "intelligence" without providing any substance as to why one should believe that, but OK. The model isn't an "intelligence" because it's not making a choice about which data you tr…

> The model isn't an "intelligence" because it's not making a choice […] There’s no evidence any of us are making choices either. I don’t think LLMs are intelligences in the way most people mean the word (I think that would be vastly overestimating their abilities) but appealing to choice when it’s so poorly understood — as poorly understood as intelligence, even — is not useful.

>There’s no evidence any of us are making choices either.

There is very clear evidence that the humans that operate the computers make the choice on which data the model gets trained on.

The discussion is about those choices.

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#889

Post by romwell » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 5:39 PM UTC

whamlastxmas wrote: post #867

romwell wrote: post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Seems lazy to differentiate between types of intelligence without providing any substance as to why you believe one type is more worthy of learning than another and criticizing others for the same laziness Seems lazy to call a genAI model "intelligence" without providing any substance as to why one should believe that, but OK. The model isn't an "intelligence" because it's not making a choice about which data you tr…

> The model isn't an "intelligence" because it's not making a choice about which data you train on and be "inspired by", as people here say. This is a very poor definition of intelligence and is not convincing of deserving training data

So says you.

Models aren't capable of existing without humans in the loop making the choice of which data they get trained on.

Consequently, those humans and their choices need to be regulated.

Re: On being listed as an artist whose work was used to train Midjourney

#890

Post by csallen » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 5:43 PM UTC

tga_d wrote: post #877

csallen wrote: post #873

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that a tool itself can't be guilty of copyright infringement, only the person using the tool can. So it doesn't matter if the GPT has some sort of "notion" of a copyrighted work in it or not. GPTs aren't sentient beings. They don't go around creating things on their own. Humans have to sit down and command them, and that point, whoever issued the command is responsible for the output. Copyright violation happ…

I'm not sure how to explain this any clearer. I am talking about neural net compression algorithms. As in, it is literally just a neural net encoding some copyrighted work, and nothing else. It is ultimately no more intelligent than a zip file, other than the file and program are the same. You can't seriously believe that these programs allow you to avoid copyright claims, can you? Movie studios, music producers, and…

A neural net designed to do nothing other than compress and decompress a copyrighted work is completely different than GPT-4, unless I'm uninformed. To me that sounds like comparing a VCR to a brain. GPT-4's technology is clearly something that "learns" in order to be able to produce novel thoughts and ideas, rather than merely compressing. A judge or jury would easily understand that it wasn't designed just to reproduce copyrighted works.

> It is clearly not the same as your mind, because your mind can and, assuming you want to stay in good standing, will provide credit for influence

I forgot to respond to this, but it's not true. Your mind is incapable of providing credit for 99.9% of its influence and inspiration, even when you want it to. You simply don't remember where you've learned most of the things you've learned. And when you have a seemingly novel idea, you can't always be aware of every single influential example of another person's work/art that combined to generate that new idea.